Good news and bad news, people. First, the good: We now have our first sneak peek at the footage from Lifetime’s new unauthorized Saved by the Bell movie, titled, creatively enough, The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story. It looks exactly as crappy and borderline defamatory as you’re imagining, and the whole thing is set to “Poison” from Bell Biv Devoe, because apparently some executive at Lifetime woke up one day a few months ago and decided it was my own personal Christmas. Unfortunately, this brings us to the bad news, which is that some other Lifetime executive — probably one who has a dark goatee and an evil laugh — decided to feed the clip straight to Buzzfeed and their fascist, totalitarian, unembeddable video player, so you’ll have to go there to watch it.

And once you do, please come on back, because I have some screencaps and some opinions about all of this.

lifetime

We open on a photo shoot for the show. The only things you need to know about the part of the clip this image is taken from are (1) Fake Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Fake Tiffani Amber Thiessen are flirting and canoodling a bit, as attractive teenagers in confined spaces are wont to do; (2) If this movie is half as terrible as that Zack Morris wig, I will be in heaven.

BUT.

DRAMA.

Apprently Fake Lark Voorhies has a thing for Fake Mark-Paul and is pissed at Fake Tiffani for flirting with him! And they’re fighting about it! Kind of!

Enter Fake Elizabeth Berkley: Peacemaker, who steps in-between them to defuse the situation. This got me thinking: How many years does this film span? Like, just the run of the show, or are we getting into their struggles to deal with teen fame as adults? I ask because if this movie ends with a Fake Paul Verhoeven approaching Fake Elizabeth Berkley and saying “… and it’s called… Showgirls,” I will need something like 2-3 weeks to recover.

Best part: Fake Mario Lopez hits the ground to rip out 20 quick push-ups before his turn in front of the camera. Say what you will about the “This is what I heard from some guy who knows a girl who cut the hair of the craft services lady” feel of some of this, but I choose to believe this part is true. 100%. In fact, I bet Mario Lopez still does this. Prove me wrong, world.

Anyway, so then Fake Dustin Diamond starts doing push-ups alongside him, and Fake Mario goes into showboat mode with some clap push-ups, which results in Fake Dustin calling him “a prick” and Fake Mark-Paul and an adult stepping between them. Two things:

Please God let the two of them actually get in a fist fight at some point during this movie.

We close with all of the stars bickering and shoving in front of the camera and one suit saying to another suit, “Well, the network didn’t kill us, but the hormones might.” This movie is going to be a spectacular stupid disaster. I’m in.

This movie needs a liveblog more than anything that has ever existed. After Screech calls him a prick, Slater says, “You want to say that to my face?” He just said it to his face! Also I thought those movie chairs usually have the actor’s name on it and not their character’s name. Maybe they just needed a visual reminded who each character was supposed to be. Never trust a big butt and a smile.

I feel like there must be a timeline where you are advertising this movie for Lifetime, because you saw it was coming out and said to your agent – in all caps, mind you, “I WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER.”

True Story – years ago (~ 2000 or 2001) I went to the Century Club in Century City – and Mr. Belding was a guest judge for a bikini modelling competition going on in the club that night. He had a mustache.

I have been down with Danger since day 1. So it pains me to say this: Saved By The Bell was shitty as fuck in both a real sense, and an ironic sense. It is, and never was, ok to like it in either manner.